Those Timesless Hours

I should be asleep. Barring that, I should at least be doing something productive. Homework perhaps.
Instead I mixed a fair portion of the Bacardi into orange juice and put on the Moonlight sonata.

Adagio sostenuto
I wonder, right now, if there is anyone who also should be asleep, who has things to do tomorrow, but who might be surfing the net. Perhaps someone googled “can’t sleep” and this blog popped up. Perhaps its someone halfway across the world. Perhaps that someone feels the same sort of restless quiet that I do right now, in this isthmus between evening and morning, in this dark stillness like the reverie of some forgotten dream.
What is this restlessness? This loneliness? It seems that I can only think honestly in the silent dark, when all else has stilled into the daily retirement of slumber. A moth creeping along my ceiling is my sole company, and the night spirals on like some horrible waking dream in which I search and search and find no one, and realize that this universe is one in which I am the only person.

I am drinking rum out of the cup Caitlin used the last time she was here. Her handwriting along the side reads “Madison” and I smile. I wonder where she is, and what she is doing. I wonder if she is staring out her window and waiting for something that she doesn’t understand, much like I am doing now.
The taste of the rum reminds me of Jordan, and the smell brings back good memories. I wonder if he is asleep, thousands of miles away and three hours’ time difference. And yet, I question. Is everyone just as far away from me, though they stand only a few feet distant?

Allegretto
I feel a bit more cheerful now that the pace has picked up. I feel like I could live. But I wonder about my pining after the friends who are far away. Is man so weak that he must have others to quench his loneliness? Man has done great things, from raising the pyramids to the Parthenon, from conquering the world to reaching the stars, but what has changed in all these centuries?

Presto agitatoI become frustrated. I suffer from a kind of double-vision: I see myself in the mirror as split into two halves, and mankind itself divided down the middle. There is at once something great, something almost god-like, creating things of overwhelming majesty, of learning and discovering, pursuing truth with the most humble yearnings, bringing forth art – music and poetry and paint – of the most awe-inspiring configurations. At times, man approaches the sublime. And yet, he sinks down low, pulled by baser instincts. Shall I endure the same feminine grace which was captured in the Birth of Venus to be strewn lewd and disgraceful across the internet? Can I bare to see the face of that masculine power which graced countless Greek and Roman statues standing on the corner in baggy pants, covered in tattoos, smoking and spitting on the ground?
Or what of my own self? In high school we used to sit in Philosophy and Ethics and discuss great and noble things, and that weekend take to drinking away the pain of being human. I go into the world and am a power, but look in the mirror and see scrawny flesh.

Alexander Pope said it best anyway,

“Created half to rise and half to fall
Great lord of all things, yet a pray to all.
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled.
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.”